Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Louis: Yam, thank you so much for your time today and talking to me. I have a little story to tell you, first of all. A few weeks ago, when I went on holidays, I decided that I would stop going on Twitter and LinkedIn every day because I used to go on those social media networks pretty much every single day and check my notifications. I did that because I felt very overwhelmed by the amount of information I was receiving every day - the number of tweets I was reading, the number of updates on LinkedIn I was reading, and I really felt like I couldn’t get away from it.

More and more content is being created today more than yesterday, and we, as marketers are even more struggling than any other population because we produce a lot of content ourself. What’s going on? - is my first question to you.

Yam: I think that marketers - and this is really linked to your own agenda, but is not marketers a part of the problem? But don’t take me for saying that. We will speak about it probably a bit later on, but I think the more we understand how the machines are working, the more content we produce. It means that if we want to improve our self-ranking - so we’re creating more keyword-targeted kind of content, with a lot of keyword density and so on and so forth. If we want to give our content some extra boost, we’re just producing - posting it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and we’ll see our friends just liking and sharing it. All of this probably result even reading the piece itself.

I think that marketers just get addicted to create more and more content, and it’s just making everything to be a bit more fluff as time goes by - if that makes sense. Because as marketers, if we creating content in order to create the content, so we are losing the real goal of why we created it. The real goal is to give some added value to our targeted audience.

I believe that this is what’s going on right now. We are like in a huge turmoil of creating a lot of content and then try to manipulate it in some sort of ways that will give it some extra exposure, and then we are getting this exposure so we think that we did something good. Eventually, we didn’t provide any kind of added value to our users, which I think quite sucks, but we’ll probably dive into that later on.

Louis: Yeah. Exactly, that’s a good intro. I think that’s a good introduction to the problem that marketers are facing right now. This episode, we’re going to try to teach people how to deal with this amount of content and perhaps also, give a few tips on how think about content, not in terms of yet another marketing tactic, but more about, exactly as you said, adding value to people’s life.

Yam, you are the co-founder of Zest.is, which is a way to discover really valuable content for marketers, and it’s a Google Chrome extension so far. It’s created by humans. You guys don’t only use machines to identify the best content; you actually have people reading every single piece of content being submitted on the platform, right?

Yam: Yes. That’s definitely right. To better describe what actually Zest is, because it’s quite different in this marketing tools landscape. I think that it’s better to describe it by the pain that we’re trying to solve. What we identified is that as professionals, whether in the marketing sphere or any other kind of sphere, whether it’s architectural design or whatever - as professionals, we don’t have an effective and a trusted way to consume content that is not only contextual (related to us), but also valuable. All of us, as professional, we just want to learn more and consume more content, and we are all overloaded with tons of information and tons of sources.

This is exactly what [trade’s 00:04:32] trying to solve - is to try and cut with the noise and bring professional marketers - because this is the segment who started [inaudible 00:04:41] and provide them with the best content possible. When we started to do that, we said, “Yeah, let’s do it with machine learning and algorithms and all these and all that.” But then we understood that if we‘ll do that, we’re just creating another kind of manipulatable platform, just like Google. Marketers learned how to manipulate their search results pages. In our own niche, the marketing niche, we have a lot of vote-based kind of platforms that you can just put your comment over there, ask for all your friends to upvote it, and then it will get some extra exposure. Does it mean that this content have some added value or action items or take aways for me as a professional marketer? No, someone just manipulated the algorithms of this platform, and the content got a lot of exposure, and then I read it.

What we understood is that we need to create some sort of a human-based model. I remembered the day that we saw Seth Godin’s lecture; I think it was in TED in 2009. Seth over there - he talked about the tribe model and how tribes are changing the way digital experience is being experienced. What we understood is we need to use the power of the tribes.

With Zest, this is exactly what we try to do, is to bring in professional marketers that will believe in our agenda, that it’s time now for professionals to consume valuable content and not fluff and manipulated kind of stuff. The way the Zest works is that the tribe or the active users are suggesting content. Then a group of chiefs, which are like - we can call them super users - they are reviewing these content suggestions, then they are making it as good or bad. The good ones are getting it to chief moderators. Right now it’s only me, and I’m quite overwhelmed but we’ll probably solve it in a bit. Just to make sure that it really stand by the - and aligned with Zest’s agenda and content quality style guide, and then we publish it on the Zest feed.

I know it sounds quite comprehensive, but eventually we understood that only a professional marketer can tell whether a piece of content have the right parameters that all the other marketers should consume this content, whether it has action items and takeaways and if it’s recent and fresh information over there. This is the way the model work. We took the Wikipedia model, where you have tons of editors over there who are just spending a lot of time, and they believe in this agenda of bringing information to others. We are now circulating our own community around consuming quality content. It seems that it’s quite engaging, and right now, the system works. It’s all around human-based filtering.

Louis: The tool is available if you go to Zest.is. If you search for it on Google, it’s very easy to find. We are recording this episode on the 11th of July 2017. I’m just curious about the key numbers that you have so far. How many active users do you have a day or a month?

Yam: Actually it’s quite surprising because as you mentioned, it’s really important to remember that Zest is a new tab Chrome extension. It lives only on a Chrome browser, and it’s a new tab extension. A lot of people think that it’s quite intrusive, but once they understand what is the added value, they really get addicted to it. I think it’s good because it’s really reflecting the good content that’s being published on Zest. We officially launched on the beginning of March - I think it was in March 7th. I think the last time we saw the report, it’s 8,200 weekly active users. If you want to dive into stats, we can definitely do that.

We are generating around 2 million pageviews a month and around 96,000 outbound clicks. Marketers will consume the content - just click on the article that they see over there. We have almost 100,000 clicks a month. That’s quite a lot, I think.

Louis: It is. Well done. That’s a nice journey. I’ve read one of your articles on Medium about why you started as I understand and how you’re planning to grow it, and I welcome any listeners to read it. We’ll post the links in the show notes of this episode.

There is one thing that I read on it that was quite funny. You said that you managed to grow by using word of mouth. I don’t like using word of mouth as a marketing channel, because to me, it is marketing. If people are talking to other people about your stuff, therefore it’s a good product and therefore it is marketing 101. That’s just the principle of it.

You are basically saying that you’ve created such a good product that people are talking about it; that’s fantastic. And then you said, “But we haven’t started any real aggressive marketing.” Which makes me ask, how would you define the real aggressive marketing?

Yam: That’s a really good question. First off, I think that word of mouth is part of the channels that the marketing have, under the marketing umbrella. You can do paid campaigns, you can do organic, you can do email marketing, you can do word of mouth. You can just decide where you put most of your attention and weight on. Some are harder to achieve than others, of course. We can discuss it further on.

I think what I meant when I wrote the “real aggressive marketing,” in my perspective - this is by the way how I go - I used to be the CMO of a big startup in Israel which is called the Webydo. I was the CMO over there for five months. I just announced today that I left this great company. They’re still going over there. They have a lot of good KPIs and they will achieve them, but because Zest grow so fast, I decided I will continue to my own gig right now.

What we did with Webydo - I’ll give it as an example for your question. We used to do a lot of paid campaigns at the beginning, when we just soft launched our campaigns. I went to the CEO over there and I told him, “Listen mate, I see that I’m just devastating your startup. I think I’m wasting all your resources, human resources or marketing budgets, just paying to those money sucking machines like Facebook and Google. We’re not seeing any kind of added value or a lot of returning users, and something is broken in our acquisition stage of the funnel.”

After they came in to the product and they tried us, and they speak with us and they understand what the value added is, so it was fine. But at the beginning, we just felt that our acquisition efforts are just too expensive. Our CAC was really high. What we said that we needed to do is that we need to do a lot of content marketing. We created better personas for our users and then we met all the digital bottlenecks that our potential personas or potential users probably hanging out in, whether it’s like blogs and forums and places like that. We met all of these sources, and then we score them. It was quite as if it [inaudible 00:12:41].

Then we started to create - we have a user acquisition funnel, and we have bloggers acquisition funnel. We started to do some kind of reach out and to understand how we can improve this kind of bloggers acquisition funnel. It came to a place where probably after two months, we created something that we call external editorial calendar. It means that each week, some 10-15 blogs published article about Webydo. It created a huge growth for something like 1 year and a couple of months. I think it was a couple of hundreds of percentage of growth on a monthly basis.

I call this tactic content retargeting. It’s not a smart retargeting with pixel, that you’re chasing after your potential user, but it’s actually that you are giving them some added value in different places where they hang out in, like blogs and forums, as I mentioned. They encounter your created content, whether it was this straight review about the product or was it like our art director blog about design inspiration and stuff like that, or a straight view in a newsletter that we sponsored or something like that.

It created a huge acquisition activities around Webydo, and we saw that the funnel numbers improved dramatically. The stickiness of the product went better, and it’s [inaudible 00:14:22] for long. This is what I mean about more kind of proactive and aggressive marketing.

Again, it’s not about trying to manipulate different kinds of platform or to do blanket SEO techniques or something like that. It’s providing real added value for our own users. We’re getting our new brand name out there, and we’re providing them with what our product can do for them that we can improve their own professional lives. This is how we got their attention. This is how we gained some trust. This is how we built our brand authority. I believe that it is a real good foundations for any product that we launch. I think it’s really good and trusted way to try and to start.

Louis: What you’re describing here is not - I wouldn’t consider that to be aggressive marketing at all. I understand a bit better now what you mean by aggressive, in a sense that it’s like a systematic approach, proactive. I wouldn’t mean aggressive marketing this way.

I would say that this is more in-your-face with [proper inaudible 00:15:28] and that kind of stuff. I like to come back to the point you made at the start of your answer, when you said that the word of mouth is a channel like any other. I beg to disagree on this, because we talked on the show with a few guests around this particular point. A lot of people are making the point that if your product is not good enough, or if your service is not good enough, therefore, you’re going to struggle as a marketer because you’re going to try to use some shady tactics in order to get there.

To me, word of mouth is the definition of a good product or a good service. I challenge you to find one good company that serves a good product that doesn’t have word of mouth as the number one way to get you people. My point is, it seems like word of mouth is more of the foundation of good marketing. The other channels are a way to leverage on that, but I don’t think it’s a channel like any other.

Yam: You know what, we can definitely agree about that, and I totally agree that you must have a good product in order to have a good word of mouth or word of mouth kind of activity at all. That’s for sure. Word of mouth cannot be generated without people understanding the added value of what you give them, whether it’s a service or a product.

I believe that I totally agree with you. I do agree that the other channels are really to support, whether it’s word of mouth or other kind of activities. I just think that it’s not only a good product that you need in order to have word of mouth, as far as it relate to - especially like us, we are targeting professionals or more kind of a B2B approach.

What we did in Zest - and maybe it will shed more light on what I meant is that I totally agree that the product is sharp and people understand the added value- but what we did in the marketing aspect or in the way that we manage the community is that we took some B2B marketing doctrines into our marketing strategy, and we try to modify them a bit for our own interest. We took the ABM doctrine, the Account Based Marketing or account-based everything, and we try to do it on what we do with Zest.

Although Zest is not a pure B2B kind of product, we do targeted audience within the niche. Those are marketers, or in our case professional marketers. We saw that 77% of our users - their job title is Director and up - a lot of VPs, a lot CMOs, a lot of founders, and they have some marketing orientation and experience. We understood that we need to communicate with these people quite in a one-on-one manner. I call it Aha! moment or a holy shit moment. It means that if someone hear about us, they are giving us a try, they are installing the tool itself, and then they have the first Aha! moment that they see, “Wow, this tool is designed quite beautifully. I want to give it a deeper look.” Then they give another try. They understand the added value of it from the content that’s been published on Zest and how everything works within the model.

Once they are suggesting content by themselves, they are getting it personalized by a real human - in this case it’s me who writes these emails to those people who suggest the content from their own Zest. I believe that you received one as well.

Louis: I did.

Yam: I think that this is what bring them to say, “No way that someone is treating that seriously to my content.” What I’m saying to them is that if you treat your product seriously, you need to treat seriously to your content as well, and this is why we are here. I believe that in this specific moment, they understand how valuable the product is, not only from the added value they are getting, but also from the whole agenda that it represents. This is really the place where we feel that people really engage, not only to their product, but also to the brand and the agenda of what we represent.

Louis: There are a lot of stuff that you talked about right there. I need to back it down. First off, if as a listener, you submit your content to the Zest platform, Yam is personally going to reply to you in an email. It’s not necessarily going to be tomorrow or whatever. At least somebody, a human is actually reaching out to you manually to talk about the content you submitted, and whether it was approved or not, which is exactly what happened to me, and which lead me basically inviting you to this podcast because you sent me a personal email. That really blew my mind.

That’s the first thing you mentioned. The second thing you mentioned is the Account Based Marketing Principles. Can you briefly go through this principles of this way of thinking?

Yam: Yeah. Account-based marketing - it’s something that - let’s try to do a short zoom-out. I think that B2B marketers in the past years had to learn a lot of things from B2C marketers - a lot of things of how to grow your brand, how to be more authentic and more eye level, and how to speak, and how to have the right tone of voice and so on and so forth. I think it’s something that happened in the last four to five years. B2B marketers learned a lot of things, a lot of doctrines from B2C marketers.

I think that what’s going on right now is that B2B marketers - they are giving away something back to B2C or to all the marketing field out there, is that something that’s called account-based - account-based in marketing - it’s of course account-based marketing, but you also have account-based sales. Some people would say, “You have account-based based everything.”

Account-based in marketing doctrine say that - of course this is everything that come from the B2B aspect - is that you only have not countless kind of number for users. You have 10,000 potential users or potential clients or 100,000 of something like that. It’s something that you need to examine. Once you understand who are your targeted potential customers, starting to build a lot of marketing methodologies around these users. It’s not a persona anymore; this is real users who uses your product or service. You actually build everything around this kind of account or this kind of account; it can be even 10 accounts that you’re just throwing them into one bucket. Or 100 accounts that you’re throwing them into one bucket, and build all your strategy around them.

The strategy start with branding, positioning, messaging - everything in that funnel. Of course you need to deliver a core event messaging throughout the funnel, and then you start to build all the other activities around there, so it will be like the acquisition stage, whether it’s by paid campaigns, content campaigns, and so on and so forth - everything that relate to onboarding, then product usage and for the KPIs.

Eventually you need to hand over those kind of users or LQLs or SQLs to the sales team, and the sales team have their own account based sales kind of methodology, and so on and so forth. Then you have the customer’s success team, etc. In B2B companies, it works - I think the best probably doctrine you can use as a marketer. Again, I don’t want to repeat myself, but we took this doctrine and we modified it to Zest a bit. We took the good part or light part from account-based marketing, and this is how we do marketing right now on Zest. I think this is part of how we achieved this word of mouth where we’re really getting in real touch with our users, and that’s the way we grow right now.

Louis: Is there any resource that you would recommend listeners around account-based marketing in particular?

Yam: I think that probably these days, the best way to go is to go read blogs of product who do huge B2B kind of marketing campaigns. I think one of best is Engagio. Engagio.com - a great blog that deal with account-based everything. You can just learn a lot of things from there. That probably will be the best source to learn account based everything.

Louis: Okay. I like to dig into the problem that we framed at the start, where marketers really struggle to learn new things or to know where to go. There are so many things that they have to absorb every day. What would be your advice - obviously, your tool is an answer to that, but it’s not the only thing that it can do - so outside of Zest, and then we can go back to it. Outside of Zest, what other things that people can do, marketers in particular - can do to not be overwhelmed by the content in front of them? How to discover the right piece of content that will actually help them?

Yam: Right. A great question again. I think the first pain that we’re really experiencing as professional marketers is information overload. This is the first thing that we need to tackle if we want to find ourself, to be more focused and to consume the right content. I believe that each one of us have a different kind of orientation and approach to the content that we prefer. If you really want to mechanize it, this process, you need to choose your top three or four or five kind of resources, and try to get the most out of them, whether it’s by subscribing to their blog list or whether it’s to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

Sources can be blogs, can be influencers, and these days with Medium, you also have great publications over there. I really love Medium. I think it’s very authentic over there - the writing style of a lot of people, super authentic, and a lot of people that are not getting enough exposure or not getting exposure at all, because they are not fighting for huge blogs or marketing blogs in our case - they’re getting a lot of exposure over there. I love Medium blogs. I really love the authentic and personal approach. People can just go to Medium, choose the right people or the people that they find that they can get the most information from. That will probably be the best solution.

Louis: Information overload is definitely the first problem, and then I think what is connected with that is the fear of missing out. What I found is that it seems like people are already scared of missing out on the next big thing or the next big trend, or the next big tips or tricks or growth hacks that you need to use to skyrocket your sales in the next 30 days type of stuff. I think it’s okay to avoid that, and it’s okay to - as you said - pick three or four sources and stick to them. You’re not ever going to be able to digest all the information available out there. Your job is really to try to make sense of what you have in front of you and trust that system to deliver the answers that you need in day to day. In stoicism, it’s called tranquility - seeking tranquility. I think that’s an important aspect of content discovery.

Yam: I think it’s so true. I’m just not sure how younger marketers or younger professionals can actually do that. I think that you need to be quite mature in order to say, “Alright, these are my given sources. These are the people that I want to follow, and I try not to suffer from a form of a fear of missing out. I help myself by following only these kinds of sources.” I totally agree with you. I think that it’s good for more mature kind of marketers. I really hope that young marketers can leverage these things as well.

Louis: That’s a good point about young marketers. I guess there are some must-go places where you can for sure discover content that is good, like Moz (around the SEO and content is very good), HubSpot (around marketing and sales), then Medium (Medium post and medium publications are really good). I guess, for younger marketers, they have to discover things, and using a platform like Zest can definitely help them to find the right content.

I wouldn’t say that they should welcome any type of content in their stream. If this starts in the start of their career by focusing on one or two things, then I think they’ll learn a good lesson in terms of marketing is about focusing on one or two things, not doing everything at the same time.

Yam: Yeah, definitely. I agree with you. I think it’s a good time to start over this way by educating yourself if you can focus on in a couple of sources, not more than that. The stuff that you mentioned, I totally are great - Moz and HubSpot and all these huge publications and blogs.

What we found out by the way with Zest, is that the lesser known the source is, the better the engagement metrics are. This is quite interesting because it seems that people - they know what they are going to consume, what kind of takeaways and action items and content that they are going to consume with HubSpot or Moz and all that. But it seemed that they’re really eager to give it a go for other kind of sources, new sources they never heard before. I think that it starts probably with fear of missing out, but eventually, we see this people come back and back to the same really small blogs of small bloggers or unknown bloggers, that they provide with a lot of authentic and real and ground-level kind of information and action items.

This is something quite fascinating that we see within our own platform. It’s probably worthwhile to write an article about it. I’ll write it down myself.

Louis: My gut will tell me that the reason why people are actually going to Zest is also because they probably know HubSpot and Moz. They probably do read it every now and then, and what they want is to discover new things, new type of content. That might be also the reason why you get more engagement from unknown authors, unknown blogs because they are maybe a little bit sick of the old platforms that have been there for years.

I’m interested in knowing, in your side, when you receive a piece of content, an article, or a podcast episode or a guide, what are your criteria to say, “This is actually good.”

Yam: That’s a great one. We have some strict content quality style guide. Of course we are speaking about, first of all, added value and what is bad content versus what is good content. I have a two paragraphs-long of what is bad content, but I think what we should do now - I’ll just read you a couple of the parameters. By them we are choosing what is a good content for Zest. We call it the Yay and the Nay.

The Yay parameter - it will be content that contains references and visuals. It will be full of takeaways. It will be actionable, insightful, in depth. It must be fresh, and it must be free. These are the Yay parameters.

The Nay parameters will be short paragraph kind of listicles. I know you hate them. I know that a lot of people hate them. I don’t have nothing about listicles - nothing bad about them. Listicles will be here probably for good, but this is a personal shout out to all the writers out there - don’t write short paragraph listicles. Give us a lot of information. It should be in-depth. If it’s a listicle, it should be something that respects itself and of course the blog had been published on. It shouldn’t be just 20 words or 30 words per number in the listicle. That’s one of the Nay parameters.

The other one is no publish date. We make sure that most of the content, they’d been published on Zest, will have a published date associated with these blog posts or podcast or video because it’s really helping us to determine whether this content is fresh and recent. That’s one of the parameters.

News checking and too-branded kind of content probably will not get approved by our guys. News items are great, but not for Zest. Zest is only good for actionable content. If the content is over gated - if you need to sign into LinkedIn and then put in your email and then refer it to a friend, only then you will get the content, so it will not get published on Zest. Of course, I must mention it, click bait probably headers - you’ll not see this kind of content being published on Zest. I hate it.

Louis: I think that’s a good overview. There are some list articles that could be good, but as you said, it tends to be a little bit of a lazy piece of writing, in order to create content for the sake of it. I’ve been using your platform for a while, and I found really good pieces of content. Now, I’ve decided not to go on this type of stuff too much because I tend to waste my time on it, and I have decided to trust my instincts and just learn by experiencing instead of learning by reading. But I think other people will definitely like to read the stuff that you guys select because it’s a really good creation. Well done on that, by the way, because it’s a very young platform, but I think it’s really promising.

What do you think marketers should learn - digital marketers in particular, what do you think that they should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years?

Yam: Maybe you’ll find it a little bit cliché but I believe that marketers should be really data-driven. Again, it’s quite cliché but it’s so true. I learn it on my own, when I was the CMO of Webydo. We really quickly started to change our vocabulary, we can say, from “I feel that we need to do that” to something that called, “I’m sure or I know that we need to do that” because you went to your BI tool or product or guys, and you ask them how this campaign performed, how these users are engaging with our product, “What is the user journey? Have they finished the onboarding properly or not? Have someone from sales team speak with these guys or not?” And once you have all these data, you put it together, you can really take solid decisions. It’s like a shortcut. Instead of trying out a lot of kind of campaigns and funnel optimization and all that, always go to the data whether it will be a mid-funnel or bottom funnel and start to recalculate your next steps from there up.

The lower the KPI is, the lower in the funnel, I mean - whether it will be MRR or ARR or expansion MRR, or whatever it is - try to understand the journey of the users that achieve this kind of KPI, and then optimize your campaigns accordingly. I think that each tool and each startup and each whatever have their own lowest or most bottom kind of KPIs. For Zest, we are quite new tool as you said. Right now our most bottom KPI will be weekly active users, or if someone clicked more than 50 times in the last week about an article, it means that he is really engaged. We are trying to understand the user journey and flows of these successful users. This is one approach.

I think the middle approach of that is to try and understand - this is the negative - take your worst kind of users, who didn’t really finish everything or didn’t meet funnel, but you know that they are potentially right for you because you have some data on them. And then try to re-optimize the channels and [inaudible 00:37:49] these guys as well. I think that eventually what you will have as a young marketer is the right tools and the right approach to tweak things without involving too much feelings and stuff like that - just base all your assumptions on data.

If someone would’ve told me about it 10 years ago, I believe that I was in a different place right now, but I think as time goes by, in these last couple of years, I think that marketers do accept this kind of approach, at least they say it. I think that it’s really important to stick to that and go back to the data on a daily basis.

Louis: What are the top three resources you would recommend to the listeners? It could be a book, it could be a podcast, it could be anything.

Yam: everyonehatesmarketers.com. That’s a very great source. I love it. I think that as far as it relates to general kind of things because I don’t want to tell you that for SEO go for that, or for paid campaigns, go to the other sources. In general, I really like smartinsights.com. They have some kind of short content over there; it’s not a longform one - really informative. They base all their content over there on data and metrics and researches. I really love this source. This is really the only one that comes to my mind right now, but I probably have couple more. I can send it to you later on for the edit.

Louis: Sure. Did you read any good books that you remember that changed the way you’re doing marketing?

Yam: That’s a weak point. I’m quite dyslexic in a way. I think the last book that I read was probably in fourth grade. I’m quite weak at that. Let’s say I’m reviewing around the 5,000 marketing articles a week. I think it’s enough.

Louis: I’d say so. Yeah. Great, you’ve been amazing. All the best with your platform and make sure to update the listeners about the progress, and hopefully I can help you to grow it as well.

Yam: Good stuff. My pleasure. Thanks for that.

Louis: No problem.